PITH AND SUBSTANCE OF ERIC AUERBACH

Ansatzpunkt, then radiate out...

LA PASSIONE

Light, more light!  - Goethe


The face of passion..


(Hear the Seven Last Words of Haydn and 'La Passione', of course Hindemith's Mathis Der Maler)

FIDEI DEFENSOR: THE AWKWARD SPIRIT OF LOVE

J M Coetzee, a respected and admirable author, paraphrases the sorrows of young Werther: Werther's malady, the stigmatic cloy of social decrepitude. According to Coetzee in the London Review of Books,

'Two energies go into the making of Werther: the confessional, which gives the book its tragic emotional force, and the political. Passionate and idealistic, Werther is representative of the best of a new generation of Germans sensitive to the stirrings of history, impatient to see the renewal of a torpid social order. An unhappy love affair may precipitate his suicide, but the deeper cause is the failure of German society to offer young people like him anything but what Goethe would later call “dull, spiritless citizen life.”

No, this is not, I fear, the answer.. The riddle is deep. As deep as the Sphinx of love. Werther conceived his passion for Charlotte, a passion agonizing to come to fruition.. Werther, ecce homo, is transported by his wound to chase eternal nuptials.

A social calamity, perhaps, a sacrifice surely... Requiem in pacem


(Compare Brahms, C Minor Piano Quartet).

CONFESSION

It is reasonable to be passionate.

...

‘If we are to have a philosophy which will intervene between attachment to rule of thumb muddling and devotion to a systematized subordination of intelligence to preëxistent ends, it can be found only in a philosophy which finds the ultimate measure of intelligence in consideration of a desirable future and in search for the means of bringing it progressively into existence’.

‘A being which can use given and finished facts as signs of things to come; which can take given things as evidences of absent things, can, in that degree, forecast the future; it can form reasonable expectations. It is capable of achieving ideas; it is possessed of intelligence. For use of the given or finished to anticipate the consequence of processes going on is precisely what is meant by "ideas," by "intelligence’ - John Dewey, Creative Intelligence: The Need for A Recovery of Philosophy

CLOUDED VISION

Clouds attract more than rain..

The Cloud of Unknowing, the Cloud Messenger, Ligeti's Clocks and Clouds, Lizst's Nuage Gris, the clouds of the Five Immortals, the clouded transcendence upon the Mount of Olives.

What is this Vision??

HIGH ART; LOW CARBON

For the first time, I truly listened to the slow movement of Brahms's First Serenade. An obvious precursor to his Third Symphony, the adagio sounds like an homage to nature, translated through a sense of noblesse oblige..

Brahma's Serenade, I argue, takes a place next to Beethoven's "Pastoral" in its voluminous treatment of nature's raw material: it inspires the 'natural sense', a Hymn to Wonderment.

Nature emits to us, our emissions cause her grief. Perhaps we all should listen closer?


(Curiously, there is a like moment in the final movement of Hindemith's Violin Concerto as an upward swell leads to a clean tonic resolution putting one in mind of the God of the Quran:

'Have We not made
The earth (as a place)
To draw together..

And made therein
Mountains standing firm,
Lofty (in stature);
And provided for you
Water sweet (and wholesome)?'

Indeed, one anticipates, in the rising sevenths of the flute to Brahms's adagio, the closing bars in the first movement of Mahler's Ninth).

RESURGENT SUN: THE BEYOND-LIGHT

So many rules, conventions, metres.. What happened to the Lumen Naturale? When/where did she disappear?

ODE TO MANNING CLARK: A HAPPY CHAOS

Embrace a happy chaos..

Australia: Go beyond good and evil.